Naming companies and products (part 1)

Recently, a high potential team of founders invited me to be their advisor on marketing strategy. Their product is a employee transport management system based on mobile App and SaaS backend, targeted at large organizations.

I knew finding a great name was a daunting exercise. All the “real” names in English dictionary have already been trademarked. The names from animal kingdom, astronomy, astrological signs, mythical characters, all are gone. All names suggestive of product attributes and company heritage are already taken. Globally, over a hindered thousand new names are trademarked annually. That makes it hard to find a meaningful and memorable name today.

I did couple of brainstorming sessions and took a few rides together with the founders in buses and cars at peak times hoping to catch our emotions and thoughts during the commute and a Segway to an exciting name. We asked our family and friends and their friends hoping to catch a ray of hope. We also dipped into the customer research founders had done, to find words that described customer asks and aspirations. I also swam through the Greek and Sanskrit dictionaries and literature hoping to discover some esoteric word representing ancient god, speed, motion or a fun activity. Ultimately what helped was a name generator program that could generate 200-billion+ combination of eight lettered words of which it claimed 10 billion could be pronounced in English. So if you are looking for a great name for your new business, good luck to you. Sincerely. J

It is a question every entrepreneur must answer – how do you come up with a name that clicks? The first step is to know what a good name looks like.

Is the name really very important

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. You guessed it right – this is a quote from Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been proven wrong many times over since then. For instance, ask beer and perfume makers. A name has plenty significance in the world of high tech products too. After all Facebook paid $8.5M to American Farm Bureau Federation in 2010 to acquire fb.com that was the sellers primary domain. Apple is rumored to have paid $1 million or thereabouts for iPhone.com in 2007. It is surprising Apple paid nothing for apple.com when it was registered on February 19, 1987. Well people hadn’t yet latched on to the idea of domain registration as a commercial product!

The point is not that a name has any disproportionate share in a business’s success. The number one software company of all times got a very average name in 1976 when Bill Gates chose it for his business. It was derived from MICROprocessor on which their SOFTware would run. There were a million “Micro somethings” around at that time, so this was a very poor and restrictive choice. But it did not stop the business from being a spectacular success.

The point is not that you can’t be successful with a bad name, but rather that a bad name can hurt you, and that there’s no reason to inflict this damage upon yourself when you can avoid it with only a few days’ worth of work.

After all, product or company naming is the first public act of branding. A product name contains important marketing communication components – corporate strategy, product concept and positioning. It communicates to the world outside as well as employees – “who you want to be”. So please pay some serious attention to the naming your product or company.

What makes a good name

A lot goes into making a name good.

For starters, a good name is easy to remember. That means the name is short, simple, easy to pronounce with no more than 2 to 3 syllables. Try remembering acetylsalicylic acid versus Bufferin. Names must also be pleasing to the ear. Even when reading, the mind translates the words into sounds. A name like Caress is as silky soft as the bath soap it represents. Imagine if eBay was named AuctionWeb or Google retained the original name for its search engine – BackRub! What images does Pharmeazy create? Did I hear sleazy? And how about messy is Strmesy?

Two, a good name draws attention and arouses interest. Being provocative is one way of getting attention, for example, Victoria’s Secret. Think of a website named – Thankbunny.com – who is thanking whom? Will I meet Playboy bunny in there? Its is provocative and arouses interest. Similarly, names like Simtre, Vaave, Ecareibe, QUSTN draw attention, arouse interest but are either difficult to understand or have a very difficult spelling to remember.

Three, a good name distinguishes your product from the competitors’. Do not use a name if it can be confused with another of your products or a competitor’s product? Consider the following three products: Media Extender, Media Connect and Windows Connect Now. While the names are strikingly similar, the products are completely different, and are, respectively: a device to make Xbox function as a media center; a device to deliver PC-stored content to your stereo or TV and an architecture to simplify wireless home networking. “This is a recipe for confusion.”

Four, it should convey something real about the company or the product and support the product’s positioning. Wharton professor Karl T. Ulrich terms this quality as – name should be evocative of the things it names. It should generate strong images, memories, or feelings in the mind about the product. You could express what the company does or what the key product benefits are in the name. For example, “ERPNext” clearly conveys it’s a ERP product and the “Next” signifies innovation, future and so on. On the contrary, it is clearly a bad idea to name your product Tiny ERP; no one expects that planning their business’s entire operations is a task that can be handled by a “tiny” anything. Finally, a name like “Planetsuperheroes” passes most of three tests so far except that it is perhaps a tad too long.

Five, can the name be trademarked? And even if it is, is the trademark defensible if challenged? If a word is already in use as a generic term, no amount of money spent takes it out of the generic category. Also, will the name infringe on a protected trademark? And even if you don’t think it does, are you ready to go to court and spend lots of money to prove it? The courts are tough on copycats. When Parfums International, a unit of Unilever Group, introduced Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion perfume in 1987, it was sued by Annick Goutal Inc., which made its own Passion fragrance. A New York judge ruled that Ms. Taylor’s product couldn’t be sold in 55 “first-tier” stores! In 2015, it was thought that Google infringed on BMW trademark rights by calling its new holding company Alphabet, the same name as a BMW subsidiary. Apparently they hadn’t as BMW has not filed a suit more than a year on. Closer home, Tata (Indigo car) has issued notice to Indigo airlines for name infringement. Often the trademark owner only starts making noise when the infringer has grown big and rich.

Six, if you have any plans of going global, you must check if the name translate into an inappropriate or obscene, repulsive or in anyway negative term in a foreign language? Couple of classic examples comes to mind – the Mercedes Benz China entry with a brand name Bensi that meant “rush to die.” Coors beer slogan “Turn It Loose,” when translated meant, “having diarrhea” in colloquial Spanish.

Reebok that picks up over 1000 new names every year for its products went horribly wrong in 1996 with a product name. Reebok named a $58 women’s running shoe “Incubus” after legal research found the name was not a registered trademark at the time. Unfortunately Reebok forgot to look up the dictionary. After shipping 53,000 pairs, Reebok learned from media that Incubus, according to medieval legend meant – a demon that has sex with sleeping women. The company issued apology but had to withdraw the product soon. To avoid such costly mistakes in future, Reebok hired a name consultant.

Seven, can the name be shrunk down to an inappropriate acronym? Does it lend itself to an undesirable pun? Merrill R. Chapman in his book “In Search of Stupidity” narrates an interesting incidence of a company selling accounting software. This company once introduced a reseller program whose name shrank to “CPR,” a most unfortunate name when selling to a market consisting of middle-aged sedentary males who are wondering if a major chestburster is in their future.

Eight, names should ideally be timeless – be able to survive the life of a product or a company. You must decide how long term are you thinking. For example 20^th Century Fox is kind of a misnomer in the 21^st Century. Kentucky Fried Chicken had to rename to KFC when going global. But Yahoo!, Google, Oracle or ERPNext are timeless names. So many companies had to make a costly change of their names after they became big or decided to go global.

Nine, a lesser consideration for the name should be how it would work on T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper sticker and other marketing collateral.

Last but not the least, the name should be available as a domain for your website. You must own the domain name associated with your product, brand, or company name. This means that if your name is JohnDoe, you must own johndoe.com.

Not johndoe.net, not myjohndoe.com, not johndoe-xxx.xxx and not johndoe.in. Being in India, you must grab .in name but always try to reserve .com domain. In some cases you can acquire a domain name that has been registered by someone else. But, honestly, this is rare for smaller companies. Maybe Apple can acquire iPhone.com for a million dollars. But, in most cases, you can’t do that. As a result, you are probably going to have to create a name that is fully available. In plain terms, you should only consider names that are either available for registration or that you are confident you can acquire for a reasonable price.

Rarely will a name do all these things equally well. For example, Amazon is a great name and does almost all these things, but does it generate strong images of online retail – hell, No. Similarly the word Starbucks by itself does not mean coffee. Should Jeff Bezos have called his company booksonline.com? No. Bezos had big ambitions for Internet retailing and it was right for him to pick a more general name with interesting and positive associations than to perfectly align his company name with his initial product strategy. The name Amazon has even allowed the company to extend its service offerings to information technology infrastructure.

With time and investment of marketing resources, a name can acquire meaning and associations, and usually grows in attractiveness. After all Starbucks did not mean coffee or generated any image of coffee but over the years it has become synonymous with coffee.

So much for now. If I happen to see some posts below I would publish part 2 that will cover naming process and some specific guidelines for naming in tech industry. I have taken liberty to comment on some of the existing product or company names. Those views are entirely mine.

04/09/201307/09/2013

Part 2: Emotionalizing the software products .. Uh…what?

The first step: build customer empathy

Microsoft built test tools in Visual Studio 2005 to address a virgin test market worth about USD 3 billion at the time. However, the product met with little success and did not create much excitement in the test community. A later in depth observational research of testers to see how they work—what’s their workflow, what tools did they use, what’s their contextual environment, revealed that more than 70% of the testers did manual testing. Most of the time they worked on one test case at a time. Their tools were manual – Microsoft word, excel, white board, paper. For many of these testers, Visual Studio became sort of a four letter word. They would complain- why are you making me do this? You are making me think like a developer!

In contrast, the test tools in VS2005 were automation based API testing tools designed for specialist testers like Microsoft SDETs. They were optimized for complex testing that required setting up a suite, a plan, a configuration, and all these things that were super-flexible and powerful. Test tools were like the Swiss army knife that could solve many problems many different ways. But to the average tester, it was impossible to get started and if one ever did, hard to use.

In short, majority of testers worked very different than the programmer testers within the company and elsewhere. It was really a case of lack of customer empathy. The team initially failed to recognize that testers outside could be entirely different beings from a Microsoft tester. After an expensive lapse, they identified a new tester persona named Ellen and released a test management environment for them in the form of Camano with VS 2010.

The cause of this lack of empathy is the curse of knowledge that software developer suffer from. They just know so much more about technology that they can’t see from an average real life users’ point of view. Microsoft software engineers did not understand majority of software testers. Possibilities of software engineers not understanding lay users are far higher.

It is important that the people behind technology products, as Tim brown, author of Change by Design, puts it, could see the world through the eyes of their customers, understand the world through their experiences and feel the world through their emotions. That is the essence of empathy.

Empathy is about knowing your customers deeply, in fact better than they know themselves. Product managers I meet recount how they are trying to do this through surveys, focus groups, usability studies, customer visits and conjoint analyses. But they are missing the point. All this data are meaningless without empathy.

So how can software developers factor in customer empathy in the software products?

One, change focus from feature driven, technology driven or competition driven product development to customer focused product development. Features often creep into products because management wants it or competition has it or because it is technologically cool. Shun these practices totally and make all your product processes customer-centric.

Two, develop strong understanding of your customer and make them center-piece in all your engineering and product decisions. Give face to those single word descriptions of customer segments. Develop personas. Put them across your office to remind developers who the customer is.

Develop customer insights beyond the obvious. Only then you have a chance to differentiate and be a winner. Use open questions and empathic listening when talking to customers. Do not stop at asking customers what they want. Customers often can’t articulate what their needs and wants are. They often learn to live with current reality thus killing all useful feedback they could give you. We have all seen people writing passwords on their palms, chaining their bicycles to the park bench, using all kinds of objects as door stoppers and so on. Such consumer needs become latent and never get surfaced in any questionnaire or interview. Customers are too occupied with their current business to be able to paint great future scenarios. They are no experts to tell you what will be a successful product in the future. Go live with them (ethnography), observe them going about their tasks in their natural habitat. Use empathy map to capture what the people in observation said and did, your interpretation of what they thought and felt and inferences of what their pain points are and what they desire to gain.

Three, stop developing features. Start developing scenarios. Scenarios are short stories told from the customer’s point of view that explains their situation and what they want to achieve. Scenarios describe the journey to a happy ending. Scenarios help shift focus from technology and mere use cases to customer. Remember, human brains are hardwired to understand stories. If you can’t tell a story out loud and have it make sense, you’re probably missing something. Make scenarios the heart of your product. Don’t ship a product with a broken heart!

Four, develop and live by a set of clear user experience (UX) principles. These principles help you make decisions that deliver a product with a clear point of view. An example of experience principles from Windows 8 (details available on the web) includes – pride in craftsmanship, change is bad unless it is great, be fast and fluid, solve distractions not discoverability, reduce concepts to increase confidence, win or lose as one.

Five, develop clear scenario success metrics. Test your scenario to this metric. For example a metric could be –

1) UX performance – did users successfully complete this scenario? How long did it take?

2) User perception – were users excited, frustrated, satisfied or annoyed while completing the scenario?

3) Functional test – does the scenario function as per specs?

Empathy approach to designing winning products has an underlying belief – it’s better to build a product that delights a small segment of users than to build one that targets everybody but doesn’t really nail it for any of them. There are countless examples of products like iPhone and OXO kitchen tools that are a roaring success with customer segments beyond what they were originally designed for.

Steve Jobs once said, “It is not the customer’s job to know what they want.” That’s absolutely right. It is yours.

20/08/201319/08/2013

Emotionalizing the software products… uh…what?

I recently delivered a workshop on building winning products. The audience identified that it was important the customers loved a product in order for it to be a winner. It also came up that consumers increasingly want to buy things that thrill and delight in addition to simply doing what they were designed to do. Today, things around us from Gillette razors to Apple devices exude desirability and emotionally engage consumers. People look at their possessions as a means to provide them self-expression and extend their personality. They also crave for great experience in the journey of whatever problem they are trying to solve. They find the mere discreet functions and features unexciting.

The new focus on emotional experience is consistent with the psychological research that confirms that people value emotional experiences more than even the product functionality. Statements like this from users, “there is shortcoming in my iPhone, but still I love it”, are commonly heard now-a-days. Indeed, “Form follows function” has given was to the more emotion led approach to design: “Feeling follows form.”

Why build emotional connect

Technology people live in a rational world and they think the rest of the world too. This is however, far from truth. Emotions drive peoples’ attitudes and behaviors. Rational thought can lead customers to being interested in the product and be happy with tangible gains from its functionality. However, it is emotions that drive customers’ desire to own the product, pay any premium and recommend it to their friends. Emotional engagement promotes loyalty and revenue growth thru word-of-mouth. There is a proven ROI in emotionalizing software.

How does this impact software? Well the software is becoming an ever growing component of the plethora of devices and services that proliferate around at home, workplace and other places. This means software has enormous possibilities for creating emotional experiences for the consumers. It makes it imperative that software developers fulfill this consumer expectation.

How to build emotional connect and satisfaction

People think about and experience life through a set of deep rooted metaphors. The metaphors help them make sense of the plethora of experiences through these metaphoric lenses. Emotional experiences happen thru the five senses – vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Software products and services are abstract in nature. Unlike other products (devices, autos, homes etc.) they can mostly leverage only vision and hearing for the emotional experience.

Keeping the challenges in mind, here is a set of steps that the author found useful in this endeavor.

Develop customer empathy to gain deeper understanding of the customer, their needs, wants, deep desires and values.
Understand that people respond to feelings, remember stories, and take actions based on deep rooted metaphors. Therefore
1. Identify metaphors people live by. Metaphors vary by culture. Metaphors change with time.
2. Use metaphors to create the symbols, icons, colors, texts, workflows etc.in interaction design.
3. Use storytelling techniques in internal and external product communication like product vision, requirements, specifications, prototypes, press releases, product positioning statements, tag lines, advertisements and documentation.
4. Keep customers and their pain points and value props alive thru the product development where daily engineering and feature decisions can easily lead to overlooking who the customers were and what they wanted.
5. During product development
  1. Personify user / customer during software development. Use personas.
  2. Build not features but complete scenarios of customer problem solving.
  3. While making engineering / business decisions constantly ask – will that persona like the change? Does the decision breaks down any end-to-end scenario?
  4. Post product development
    1. Create emotional connect at every touch point like sales transaction, support and upgrades.

We shall delve deeper into each of these steps in forthcoming blogs.

25/04/201323/04/2013

To open source or not….

Ashok was perturbed. In Jan 2006, an eastern European company had taken his source code, made minor changes and started selling it under an alternate brand name at a reduced price. Ashok’s company Chartengo was a pioneer in Adobe Flash based charting software that helped users create charts for data visualization. Its charts were perceptibly superior to any available on the market. The company had five employees and revenues of $500,000 in 2006. It used to offer source code with its USD 99 developer version of the product. A growing business like Chartengo was sandwiched between free libraries on the Internet and large data visualization vendors (revenues > $100 million) on the other. In between it also had to content with few hundreds of competitors. The possibility of a vendor infringing on Chartengo IP in some distant corner of the globe was high.

Chartengo did not have a legal team so they contacted a firm that specialised in copyright infringements. The firm quoted $250,000 to file a suit but there would be additional fees for court appearances. besides the unaffordable legal fees, Ashok was apprehensive about the stance an eastern European court would take in this matter. He decided to forego the legal route. He talked to development team and few experts outside. A surprise suggestion with overwhelming majority was – make your product code open source. They said open source code will make it difficult for infringers to compete. Why should customers pay for a code that is open source from the original vendor? Ashok’s team of developers was thrilled with the idea of open sourcing their code. It would accelerate innovation and save them time developing everything themselves. They felt perhaps the customers would also be happy. They could also see an opportunity for higher revenues. The open source would probably draw more customers, especially those who were sceptic of dealing with a small company like Chartengo.

Ashok had so far found it the best strategy to protect its intellectual property. He believed innovation would only happen if it could be exploited for exclusive financial benefits of the innovator. How could he even think of handing over his crown jewels to the infringers in the marketplace? The thought of handing over his IP to these hackers and letting them enter their random untested code into it thus contaminating its pure quality was appalling to Ashok. He clearly saw his competitive advantage evaporating with opening his source code. Yet, at that time, open source was rising like a tsunami? Apart from individuals hacking into your code, well-funded companies were also doing so. There was passion about open source. Even customers were enamoured by open source culture. It was turning into a religion.

The question is – what should Ashok should do?